EDIBS - embedded digital broadcast services

  • Status
    Completed
  • Status date
    2014-12-09
Objectives

We will evaluate a concept to enhance and enrich digital transmitted TV programs. The core of EDIBS consists of certain applications based on digital broadcast standards and content services utilizing these applications.

Our concept is to embed these additional services within the digital transmission stream using the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP)standard for DVB set-top boxes (STB).By using common digital satellite transmission technologies,the TV- stations should be enabled to offer additional Program services and new forms of embedded advertisement within a parallel program flow.

The idea is to dynamically add narrow-or wideband streams to digital broadband TV transmission and to embed special services within the original digital broadcast stream. The required bandwidth of the additional streams could vary depending on the importance of the content and the required bandwidth of the original stream. Using this technology, content services should be transmitted which are processed by a application ,running on MHP compliant DVB set -top Boxes. Our highest effort in developing the concept focuses on the huge benefits for broadcasters as well as TV consumers.

Challenges
  • Transmissio /Play-out solution via DVB /MHP
  • Client MHP Application
  • Content Service products.

Our final goal is to enable a TV-statio to transmit embedded video services and provide free to air all necessary applications for reception and playback to the STB.

Benefits

There is no doubt that digital television will initiate a huge step to personalized television. EDIBS offers a wide field of smart programmes which enables broadcasters to secure advertising reception even if a programme is recorded or timeshifted with a PVR. The way we propose, is the only one which is proofed to work (in television history): we intend to offer several additional benefits to the viewers and give them the opportunity to choose.

Features

There seem to be several ways for a technical realization, so our plan is to find out the most suitable one. Then we will develop necessary structures for the applications, to manage and transmit embedded data, which will transport chunks of digital audiovisual streams and which are intended to be used by customer TV -stations.

For the receiving unit (the STB)we will develop the structure of software that accepts, stores, manages, controls and finally presets the embedded data and all the connected additional functions. There are different possibilities of using certain functionalities of the DVB-MHP standard, to achieve our goal. Within the project we will evaluate the most suitable one. We believe that all this could be done by using standard DVB MHP specifications.

As we expect that the usable bandwidth for embedded transmission within a MHP stream will be very low we will evaluate another method to supply additional bandwidth for embedding streams by e coding DVB streams at a variable bit rate and to use the bandwidth we could free for embedding a additional content stream. The MHP receiving client application will u -pack the streams and will store the narrowband one. All this shall be realized by being compliant to all DVB MHP standards.

Plan

The whole project is split into 3 phases of nearly the same intended length as we see the forthcoming amount of work in three themes covering Evaluation, prototyping and testing & proof. We estimate the duration of each phase at a little less than 3 months. There are milestones at logical result points in the middle and at the end of each phase.

Current status

The project has been completed in December 2004 with the development of the EDIBS ECS (embedded content server) prototype and the EDIBS MHP client prototype.

Prime Contractor